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Could online data serve as an effective estimator for the 2008 election?

What do BarackObama.com and HillaryClinton.com have in common?  Both use Google Analytics for tracking stats. Google already has data about the candidates’ online popularity via search volume and news indexing, now they also have a complete look at the visitors and usuage of both sites. (Excluding those 1% of visitors with JavaScript disabled, if you think about things like that).  Too bad JohnMcCain.com uses WebSideStory, otherwise Google would have by far the best dataset available for estimating the result of the 2008 election using only online stats.

I imagine combining offline polls with realtime web stats will play a big role in predicting future elections, if not this one. I wonder if Sergey & Larry will be the first 2 people to know the outcome of this one.Here are the analytics code snippets from BarackObama.com, HillaryClinton.com, and JohnMcCain.com (you can see Barack uses the new Google Analytics code, while Hillary’s site is a bit behind):

Barack: <script type=“text/javascript” src=“https://ssl.google-analytics.com/ga.js”></script>

Hillary: <!– Begin Google Analytics –>
	<script src=“http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=“text/javascript”></script>
	<script type=“text/javascript”>_uacct = “UA-1161728-1″; udn=”hillaryclinton.com”; urchinTracker();</script>
	<!– End Google Analytics –>

McCain:

<!–WEBSIDESTORY CODE HBX2.0 (Universal)–>
<!–COPYRIGHT 1997-2005 WEBSIDESTORY,INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. U.S.PATENT No. 6,393,479B1. MORE INFO:http://websidestory.com/privacy–>
<script l